So come and dress me in the blossoms of a million pink trees

Every year I remind myself to say something when Hans Conried's birthday comes around and every year I forget to, because it's the day after my father's.¹ This year would have been Conried's ninety-ninth, so I'm saying something.

He's one of my favorite actors, though I mostly talk about him as though this fact is self-explanatory. I feel it should be. I noticed him first with The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953), because how the hell do you ignore something like that? Especially if you're me, you don't ignore the lanky zany at the center of the insanity with his quick-change voice, his preening eyebrows, and his preternatural ability to wear some of the silliest costumes designed and filmed by humanity. Don't take my word for it. "Live-action Dr. Seuss" is a contradiction in terms, but Conried looked like one of Geisel's characters, springily etiolated, carrying a supercilious gesture to his very fingers' ends. With his flopping dark hair and his diamond-shaped flexible face, he made me think of Don Quixote even while he was threatening to disintegrate Peter Lind Hayes or cowering from Tommy Rettig's "very atomic" music-fix. He was about a year older at the time of filming than I am now. I had a new favorite character actor.

And as so often happens with character actors, it promptly turned out that I had been seeing—and hearing—him on and off for years. Conried worked most steadily as a voice actor, having started in radio before he was even out of his teens; if not quite as preposterously ubiquitous as Paul Frees, he was a household name through several decades. As the threadbare violinist living upstairs from Marie Wilson and Cathy Lewis on the original radio version of My Friend Irma (1947–54), he entered every episode with a meek, Russian-Yiddish "It's only me, Professor Kropotkin"; if he didn't originate the role of Dr. Leon Alberts in the original 1937 broadcast of the legendary "Chicken Heart" episode of Lights Out!, his later re-recording was the only version that existed until the PMRP. He worked with Orson Welles, Edgar Bergen, George Burns and Gracie Allen. When radio faded, he transitioned into television; he appeared in films, though rarely in leading roles, throughout. I expect I encountered his ever-dastardly Snidely Whiplash in re-runs of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (1959–64) some Friday at a friend's house when I watched the only mainstream cartoons of my childhood. I definitely saw him co-starring with Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen in Disney's Davy Crockett at the Alamo (1955) as a high-flown dandy of a riverboat gambler who owes drinks all round after Davy catches him cheating at the shell game; he quotes Shakespeare sadly when discovered, even more disconsolately when drunk, and follows Davy all the way to a heroic death at the Alamo, which is the kind of ending that stays with a person after summer camp. I don't like most of Disney's Peter Pan (1953), but I pray to the small gods of cinema that someday the animators' reference film will surface in an archive in Argentina because Conried's distinctive gestures are all over the blocking of Mr. Darling and Captain Hook. The surviving photos are tantalizing.² I find it disproportionately hilarious that he portrayed Uncle Tonoose on The Danny Thomas Show (1953–64), because my father has always used the name to represent any hypothetical relative in a conversation. At the point where I learned that Conried had voiced Thorin in Rankin and Bass' The Hobbit (1977), I gave up on trying to guess where he would turn up next. The answer, for the record, turned out to be Halloween Is Grinch Night (1977).

He had an astonishingly beautiful speaking voice when he played straight with it, softly sonorous and meticulously articulated; in comedy he showed off a lot of grit and racket and reed, with a particular flair for the outraged skid into falsetto. You can hear some of his versatility with the Suspense episodes "Murder Strikes Three Times" (1950) and "Rave Notice" (1954) as well as Gunsmoke's "Shakespeare" (1952). He ran a reliable line in European accents, Mittel- and Eastern most popular.³ Playing himself on game shows or hosting Fractured Flickers (1963–64), he was haughtily or bemusedly mid-Atlantic. His voice sharpened into an acerbic growl as he aged, without ever losing the high-strung edge. It was a loss to Gilbert and Sullivan that as far as I can tell he was never cast as Pooh-Bah. He could sound middle-aged and disdainful in his twenties—the sardonically arched brows helped. I would have paid good money to hear his precisely enunciated "I can't help it. I was born sneering."

I just like him wherever I find him, almost regardless of the film. That means The Monster That Challenged the World (1957), where his competent scientist is a lot smarter than the movie he's in; that means The Gay Falcon (1941), where his uncredited, impatient sketch artist is the youngest I've seen him so far; that means Behave Yourself! (1951), a rather dicey comedy-thriller intermittently redeemed by the presence of actors like Lon Chaney, Jr. and Elisha Cook, Jr. and by Conried's Cockney-accented assassin, delivering his report to gangland boss Francis L. Sullivan while the latter is taking a bath and the former is snacking on grapes with a sort of absent-minded nervousness. He makes a short-lived appearance as a stage magician in Journey into Fear (1943). I'd have liked him better in Summer Stock (1950) if some idiot at MGM hadn't decided to dub his singing voice. I could never have seen him onstage in Can-Can (1953) or 70, Girls, 70 (1971), but I have the original cast recordings with which to enjoy his insufferably pretentious sculptor of the Belle Époque and his contemporary senior citizen helping organize a heist with a patter song. If you watch him on Pantomime Quiz, he looks like a proto-Ryan Stiles—other contestants get proverbs or well-known lines of Shakespeare to enact while Conried gets handed mishegos like "He who dances must pay the piper—also the waiter, the hat-check girl, the parking attendant, and the doorman" or "Though I tried to be aloof, when you pushed me off the roof, I feel our romance is dead." I haven't a clue what led to the creation of the album Monster Rally (1959) with Alice Pearce, but it's worth it for songs like "Flying Saucer" ("The one that's double-parked outside").

I know very little about his life that I can't track through his performances. There exists one biography of him, Suzanne Gargiulo's Hans Conried: A Biography (2002), and I've been looking for it in used book stores since 2009, with demoralizing unsuccess. Anecdotes suggest he was a sweet person; he certainly interviewed intelligently and interestingly. Quite a lot of the internet likes him—the A.V. Club analyzed The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T's hypnotism duel and once referred to him as "the thinking man's Dr. Zachary Smith." He was sixty-four when he died, which is my father's age as of yesterday, which is too young for fatal heart attacks.

In any case, in his honor, please enjoy the Cuban Boys' "Ten Happy Fingers." It is not a remix of the song of the same name from The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T; it is a remix of the movie and it is a tremendous earworm. Hans Conried, wherever you may roam, you will always look to me like a megalomaniacal piano teacher in a very silly hat. We'll always have the Happy Finger Institute.

1. Naturally, due to family schedules this year, not everyone was available to celebrate my father's birthday yesterday, so the observance was tonight. I spent most of my day shopping for dinner ingredients and making a Grand Marnier-brushed orange sponge cake filled with orange-and-clementine whipped cream, glazed with chocolate and candied orange peel. He'd requested something with fruit. What is this top you speak of going over?

2. There are a number collected under the appropriate tags here. Told you it wasn't just me.

3. His father was a Jewish émigré from Vienna; his birth name was Hans Georg Conried, Jr. Supposedly he would meet questions about whether he had changed his name with an incredulous "To this?"